The Numbers Behind Pornography

Pornography has been a part of life since men learned to draw. It has been found on cave walls, the Romans used it as graffiti, and in Asian it was a part of the woodblock printing industry. Now that the major avenue for accessing porn is the internet we have a very good idea who is consuming it, how, and from where. So while pornography has been prevalent throughout human history it has only been in the last years that we have been able to learn how much is being consumed.

It turns out that roughly half the internet using population views pornographic material (or 43%). Of that number 1 in 3 are female, destroying the stereotype that pornography is typically a habit for males. It was thought for a long time that it was consumed mostly by men, and it is true that there is larger population of males viewing pornography, but 1 in 3 is a fairly significant portion of women.

Perhaps the most astounding statistic (or least depending on your age) is that the search terms “sex” and “porn” are the in the top 5 most common searches for children under the age of 18. Unfortunately only about 3% of websites require adult verification meaning that most porn is freely available to anyone able to use a search engine and a keyboard.

35% of internet users actually download the porn they watch for later even though the average porn viewing time is only 15 minutes per session. Many pornography users acknowledge it as a problem, after being surveyed 10% admit to being addicted. The state of Utah enjoys the greatest addiction statistics as it consumes more pornography than any other state in the union.

Interestingly, pornography is not mostly consumed in the US though much of it is produced here. Actually the country that has the highest consumption of pornography is China which accounts for 28% of this $97 billion dollar industry. South Korea is just behind China at 27% with Japan close to that at 21%, the US accounts for about 14%. But the US is different in that it is more of a producer than it is a consumer. Fully 90% of the pornographic films on the market are produced in the San Fernando Valley in California, releasing 20,000 movies a year. Right now there are some 800 million adult video rentals across the US.